In order to develop SSR resources for ten important North American hardwood tree species, we individually barcoded and multiplex sequenced DNA from ten hardwood forest tree species using short reads produced from an Illumina HiSeq. Raw reads can be downloaded from the NCBI short read archive, project SRP021923. Bioinformatic processing included trimming, assembly, SSR identification and primer design, processing details including scripts are available. SSR design was sucessful for all ten species, with a marked prevalence of dinucleotide repeats in all species: